Apple Music Apple Music is terrible

[211]

I really hope Apple goes back to improving Apple Music and the Music apps on macOS, tvOS and iOS. Apple should be king of the hill when it comes to music, considering it came out with the best music app 20 years ago with iTunes. Since then, it became a bloated mess with each update. I thought the Music app would be considerably better after separating Podcasts, TV and device management. That didn't happen as it appears Apple has decided to forget about the app, other than making changes nobody asked for.

Apple Music's interface is a mess; you can't find easily what you are looking for. The search function is absolutely useless. The results are not at all complete for what is in Apple Music's library, only showing the same songs just from different albums of the same artist. Songs don't play straight away when streaming, this is particularly a problem on iOS. Sometimes I have to force close the app for the song to finally play. I wanted songs that I add or Like on iOS Music app to appear on macOS Music app; quite a lot of times this doesn't happen. The "Add to Library" and "Delete from Library" is confusing in does that mean I'm only deleting the playlist and keeping the songs or I'm also deleting the songs, or I'm only adding/deleting from one device and this won't affect other devices. The Music app decides to do something different in each scenario. Also on iOS you can't see the full title of a track in a list. This is so annoying when there are several tracks that have the same name at the beginning, but different at the end (eg. a song with remixes). Songs I added/deleted suddenly appear/disappear from macOS Music app. The search function on Music app macOS doesn't just narrow down the library but another window appears with a different display that is useless.

The above is just off the top of my head. I hope Apple revisits all their apps, rather than rushing out more features only to add more issues to an ever-growing list.

 

[gurple]

You guys are all right. Every complaint. Every praise. Including the contradicting opinions. I'll smash it all together and I find that these macOS apps are total trash. I can't see clearly what they're doing under the hood or what process parts are talking to the outside world for this and that feature execution. It's frustrating.

The performance is abysmal. Is this because these apps are playgrounds for Apple to learn how to use their own Catalyst or some UI framework? I have no idea. It just sucks whatever it is. Does this app want to be a broken web browser? Does it want to be a 'native' macOS application? What is it?

I keep files for my music library on big Synology NAS with the actual 'Music Library.musiclibrary' file sitting in the default location on the internal storage. Sure, I should expect that to be slower for the OS and Music.app to interact with the NAS rather than internal or direct attached storage. But, really now… I want to import to Music.app a new album of files on the NAS. It takes an inordinate amount or time for Music.app to serially read through these new files and update the .musiclibrary DB files. From the terminal I can serially 'cat' all those new files in a handful of seconds. Why is Music.app taking minutes? Why does it effectively freeze up the rest of the app while it's doing this import task? Don't we have threads and parallel processing and multi-core systems with well-sufficient RAM? What the hell?

Why is updating the Genius data on the library (or turning back on after I turned off hoping it would fix/refresh) totally broken? Has whatever process that does this heavy lifting failed to reach some backend server in Apple's content delivery network? Is DNS returning bad info? Has some mysterious certificate or key pair gone missing from or expiredin Keychain? Has Apple simply trashed this feature hoping it will nudge me towards spending more money with them to subscribe to their streaming offering? Where are the understandable logs to come to useful conclusions?

Why is the AirPlay feature unreliable in Music.app (and even worse in Podcasts.app) when it is reliable for the OS as set in System Settings -> Sound?

I'll accept these apps' UI design choices even if they are a little odd and out of place. Those are just hieroglyphic sketches on a screen. But something is really sloppy under the hood of these apps. I wonder if Catalyst is to blame.

/rant --off

 

[GWLBE]

A simple crossfade on the AM.app would be nice. Its on the android AM.app.

 

[Eric Idle]

Why would anyone think Apple cares about improving Apple Music? Seriously! Apple doesn't give a damn.

 

[Marbles1]

However...it is one of the only ones that allows me to upload all of the custom songs or 'ungettable' tracks: YouTube covers, soundtracks, special editions, purchases from other platforms, etc. and have them cloud synced to all my devices

Very true - however it's still gimped - try playing an uploaded song from, for example, an Amazon Echo device where you've enabled Apple Music Integration. Or indeed anything that connects to the Apple Music 'service' - it won't play it. Apple Music sourced songs only.

Might not be a problem for most, but it's a real bugbear for me. I've got about 2000 uploaded songs, rare mixes, ripped vinyl LPs and so on, and I can't play any of it from an amazon echo, even if it's in a playlist etc.

 

[Marbles1]

Apple surely knows most of these criticisms - from the generally clunkiness of the app, through to the crap way search 'works' where you type something and can't flick between your library or Apple Music, and the way the whole app still feels like a weird 'web view' of your music collection. The older iTunes felt far more robust in terms of searching, and music management. I felt like I 'had' the albums; that they were mine. Youtube music is far better for search, Spotify feels like they're really putting music at the heart of the app, Apple Music feels like it's just been left to the B-team for the past 10 years.

And to think that at one point iPod + iTunes + Mac was the holy grail of the halo effect, getting people tied into the ecosystem.

Apple still haven't released Apple Music Classical for Mac. And you STILL can't 'love' songs from Apple Music Classical either.

 

[PegasusTenma]

For me the deal breaker from the launch of the Apple Music app was the comparison when loading a song. You click on the Spotify song and is magically instantaneous, on Apple Music it always lags.

 

[Marbles1]

Apple's USP should really be that they 'get' music. I'd expect there to be reams of meta data, album art. Sleeve writings. Loads of historical information and cool looking biographies of musicians. not a few paragraphs of 9-point sized text in light grey if you click the right buttons.

I want to be able to choose an artist and have the ability to add all their albums and EPs in release order to a playlist to listen to their entire work.

I want to get notifications AND email alerts when a favourite artist has a new album on pre-release and for this to be rock solid - not the thing at the moment where maybe just maybe you might notice a thin at the top of Apple Music for iPhone saying there's a new song by artist x.

And please get rid of all the horrid white space, weird clunkiness, tiny 'back arrows' all on their own to navigate around the application. It's a disgrace really.

 

[okkibs]

It takes an inordinate amount or time for Music.app to serially read through these new files and update the .musiclibrary DB files. From the terminal I can serially 'cat' all those new files in a handful of seconds. Why is Music.app taking minutes? Why does it effectively freeze up the rest of the app while it's doing this import task?

And I thought it was just me. I have the exact same issue, if I add a more than a single album at once to the library, residing in my library folder on Samba network storage already (so no extra copying required), Music.app will sit around with a spinning beachball for about half an hour doing nothing whatsoever. Afterwards, it imports and arranges the folder structure within seconds. It might be much longer for me because I rip my CDs in lossless format.

What I love the most about it is when I have music playing through Music.app whilst starting the import process. Media controls are now useless. The current song will finish playing and then nothing. However, minutes later sometimes the next song starts playing only to keep stopping randomly as if buffering. And all that over wired 10GbE where I can in the meantime easily copy files around to and from the same Samba share at 300+MB/s.

And that's on a M1 Max of course. If I didn't need the Music app for syncing to all my Apple devices, I'd be looking into third party apps immediately.

 

[Eric Idle]

Apple's USP should really be that they 'get' music. I'd expect there to be reams of meta data, album art. Sleeve writings. Loads of historical information and cool looking biographies of musicians. not a few paragraphs of 9-point sized text in light grey if you click the right buttons.

I want to be able to choose an artist and have the ability to add all their albums and EPs in release order to a playlist to listen to their entire work.

I want to get notifications AND email alerts when a favourite artist has a new album on pre-release and for this to be rock solid - not the thing at the moment where maybe just maybe you might notice a thin at the top of Apple Music for iPhone saying there's a new song by artist x.

And please get rid of all the horrid white space, weird clunkiness, tiny 'back arrows' all on their own to navigate around the application. It's a disgrace really.

Very well said. Apple Music is an absolute disgrace. Pure, unmitigated trash. I am all in Apple's eco system but Apple Music is such a hateful experience that I am slowly being pushed out. I just loathe how Apple releases something and then never does a damn thing to improve it. A company with hundreds of billions of dollars never seems to be able to truly develop software into something elegant, classy, something one wants to use. Nope, it just gets dumped on you. Use this and LIKE it is what Apple is saying.

 

[PegasusTenma]

I just loathe how Apple releases something and then never does a damn thing to improve it.

This is.... not true? What a weird rant. The whole design policy of Apple is literally iterating on everything done before.

 

[Expos of 1969]

This is.... not true? What a weird rant. The whole design policy of Apple is literally iterating on everything done before.

Completely not a valid statement with regards to Apple Music.

 

[PegasusTenma]

Completely not a valid statement with regards to Apple Music.

I am replying to the statement made about Apple in general which is simply untrue.

 

[Expos of 1969]

I am replying to the statement made about Apple in general which is simply untrue.

Well, the thread is "Apple Music is Terrible" and poster Eric Idle was clearly talking about Apple Music and did not reference any other software and certainly not hardware so your response is quite unrelated to the discussion.

 

[StarShot]

I just tried out the 3-month trial today, and cancelled it literally within an hour. It's just useless. Searching for artists gets me blank pages on my Mac, I keep getting "An error occurred" messages, and it just feels... clunky.

Was it hard to cancel Music? I'm getting a free offer for 3 months to Music along with Apple TV since I just bought a new MacBook Pro 16". I'm in the middle of a 12 month subscription to Apple TV so will have to pass on that one.

 

[Expos of 1969]

Apple Music's Browse is brimming with crap today...

The first four recommended to me are...

- some nobody called Saint Harison
- Sam Smith
- Ed Sheeran
- Eurovision Song Contest. "The world's best singers" according to Apple.

The photos of the first three are bad enough, let alone actually turning on the music.

Your taste may be different of course...

 

[tekfranz]

Apple Music's Browse is brimming with crap today...

The first four recommended to me are...

- some nobody called Saint Harison
- Sam Smith
- Ed Sheeran
- Eurovision Song Contest. "The world's best singers" according to Apple.

The photos of the first three are bad enough, let alone actually turning on the music.

Your taste may be different of course...

YouTube Music is really shining here in providing accurate suggestions for new music to listen to.

I cancelled my last trial of Apple Music due to inappropriate Album Art showing up in the “My Station” curated playlist. YouTube Music makes it easy to report issues like that to their team via a feedback button where you can send a screenshot.

 

[jafo72]

My issue with Apple Music is that for the last 18 months if I have a playlist that I add from Apple Music to My Library at random times part of the music in those playlists disappear from my library only to reappear a few days after. It happens all the time and it is frustrating. The strange part is that if I delete the playlist from my Library and look for the playlist outside of My Library, then the songs never disappear. I have contacted Apple Support 5-6 times already and they can't pinpoint what the issue is. They need to address all these bugs pronto because Spotify grows more attractive to me by the minute.

 

[Uofmtiger]

Apple Music's Browse is brimming with crap today...

The first four recommended to me are...

- some nobody called Saint Harison
- Sam Smith
- Ed Sheeran
- Eurovision Song Contest. "The world's best singers" according to Apple.

The photos of the first three are bad enough, let alone actually turning on the music.

Your taste may be different of course...

I never use the browse screen unless I want to scroll down to get to genres. The “Listen Now” screen is the one built around your tastes and not the pop music at the moment ( like the browse screen). I know Ed Sheeran is one of the top streamed artists, so it’s not surprising that Apple is providing it as a recommendation on the browse screen.

 

[Eric Idle]

It's like Apple doesn't even care about the experience using Apple Music. I can't count the number of times I've just shut off that crappy app, disgusted with how miserable the experience was.

 

[madeirabhoy]

i really dont get why people would want podcasts and music to be in the same app. this would be a huge step backwards imho. they are very different things. yes the music app could be better, and yes the podcasts app could be better, but surely the way to do that is for apple to look individually at each and improve them for what they are, not shove two very different products into one messy app.

 

[madeirabhoy]

This analogy makes zero sense.

Why get cable if you're not going to watch every channel? Why pay for Netflix if you're never going to watch every movie? Why get a library card if you're not going to read every book? Why buy an album if you're not going to listen to every song?

i sort of get what he means though. there seems to be a push towards all together streaming with 50 million songs, which for a lot of people is the best way, but for a lot of people it isnt.

I only pay for itunes match as most of the music i listen to is the stuff from my youth, so why pay the equivalent of 12 CDs a year if i dont take benefit of listening to lots of other music, which a lot of people do but i generally dont. If i do listen to new music its on the radio.

 

[Uofmtiger]

i really dont get why people would want podcasts and music to be in the same app. this would be a huge step backwards imho. they are very different things. yes the music app could be better, and yes the podcasts app could be better, but surely the way to do that is for apple to look individually at each and improve them for what they are, not shove two very different products into one messy app.

I agree, i hate it when I just want to hear music and other apps have podcast recommendations all over the place clogging up space on the small iPhone screen. I use Overcast for podcast and would prefer to keep podcasts out of my music app.

 

[Edd70]

Interesting reading this thread as I’ve just switched over from Spotify a few weeks ago, after using it for about 4 years. I transferred a playlist of liked songs over using Songshift and that appeared to dramatically improve recommendations. Prior to that, Apple Music really really wanted me to listen to Taylor Swift. It’s like she’s their mascot.

Sound quality seems better than Spotify on the whole.

I don’t own any music through iTunes so I don’t have issues combining libraries or anything.

At home, we’re almost always playing music through the Apple TV app to Sonos speakers and that all works well. Switching profiles between myself and my wife on the Apple TV hasn’t been an issue.

We both use Windows laptops for work so I use Apple Music through an Edge web browser. I don’t get why you can’t blow up what’s currently playing to full screen album art and controls like Spotify and Pandora but whatever.

I agree that Podcast and Music should be separate apps. I’ve made two serious attempts in the last 5 years to use Apple Podcast but the arrangement of your podcast library is dreadful for me to the point of being unusable. I use Downcast, they do it logically with no fuss. I was never tempted to use Spotify’s podcasts.

 

[Omega Mac]

Apple music is woeful becasue of the UI and I'm finding UI is overall getting worse in a lot of other apps. It' frustrating trying to find music and desktop should be wonderful, it's a absolute rubbish, it's as if someone said "hey lets forget everything we've pioneered in terms of UI/UX at Apple and reinvent at every update...", many of the point made here I could make but wont they have been made very well, however!

I really hope Apple goes back to improving Apple Music and the Music apps on macOS, tvOS and iOS. Apple should be king of the hill when it comes to music, considering it came out with the best music app 20 years ago with iTunes. Since then, it became a bloated mess with each update. I thought the Music app would be considerably better after separating Podcasts, TV and device management. That didn't happen as it appears Apple has decided to forget about the app, other than making changes nobody asked for.

Apple Music's interface is a mess; you can't find easily what you are looking for. The search function is absolutely useless. The results are not at all complete for what is in Apple Music's library, only showing the same songs just from different albums of the same artist. Songs don't play straight away when streaming, this is particularly a problem on iOS. Sometimes I have to force close the app for the song to finally play. I wanted songs that I add or Like on iOS Music app to appear on macOS Music app; quite a lot of times this doesn't happen. The "Add to Library" and "Delete from Library" is confusing in does that mean I'm only deleting the playlist and keeping the songs or I'm also deleting the songs, or I'm only adding/deleting from one device and this won't affect other devices. The Music app decides to do something different in each scenario. Also on iOS you can't see the full title of a track in a list. This is so annoying when there are several tracks that have the same name at the beginning, but different at the end (eg. a song with remixes). Songs I added/deleted suddenly appear/disappear from macOS Music app. The search function on Music app macOS doesn't just narrow down the library but another window appears with a different display that is useless.

The above is just off the top of my head. I hope Apple revisits all their apps, rather than rushing out more features only to add more issues to an ever-growing list.

It's intersting to read the common experience of users search troubles, that it makes be wonder or doubt, even though you think you are are paying for access to the entire 50 million+ song catalogue, it's very possible because of the borked apps, you can not actually effectively search it all becasue it is not truly serving you up full results.

If this is true is this not a class action waiting to happen?

We see this in search engines, touted millions of result but nothing after a few next pages. Things in tech are now working out the way people expected, well the tech giants are getting away with things that are hard to detect.

So here is the deal - Is it actually possible to use Apple Music to find any and all songs in the catalogue?

If the answer is no...